Our policies and the new FTC Disclosure rules

March 16, 2013

FTC Disclosure

If you are a beauty blog reader you’ve seen posts like this popping up on many of your favorite blogs. The FTC has changed the rules for bloggers on disclosure. They didn’t think we were doing enough by telling you we got something sent to us for review. They want us to shout it from the rooftops it seems. There appears to be a fear that you’ll be interested enough to buy a product without noting that blogs might not have paid for it. On Beauty Info Zone we buy a lot of the items we review but we are also fortunate enough to get items sent to us. So many are new discoveries of brands that we’d never know about if we weren’t lucky enough to receive them from the companies or their PR teams.

Like our readers, we aren’t made of money. We know the value of a product and don’t want to spend our money on items that might not be wonderful, nor do we want you to do that. The trust you place in us when deciding whether or not to buy something is valuable to us. Why would you come back and read what we have to say if we steered you wrong? When we are sent items we don’t promise to review every single one. If we feel this wouldn’t work for our readers we often don’t review it. Our goal is to give you our honest opinions.

We always state at the end of a review if the product was a PR sample. Unfortunately now we will also have to tell you IN the review if an item was sent to us. It ruins the flow of our fabulous prose but we have no choice. We are also always honest and tell you if the post is sponsored by someone. Those don’t happen often and we’ve been upfront about the ones that we’ve done, but now we have to go up on the rooftop again. The same with any affiliate links that we might have. As bloggers who make basically no money off our blog we are being held to higher standards than magazines like O, Allure, Marie Claire, InStyle etc. that don’t have to disclose, even on their blogs they don’t have disclosure. Please forgive us if we sound repetitious when stating the obvious but it’s a necessity. We promise to always tell you the truth. Pinky swear. – Marcia and Lisa

Many bloggers are speaking out about this. Phyrra has compiled a list of what other bloggers have said that is quite comprehensive. We thought you might be interested in seeing the views of other blogs and how they’ll be handling this. Her post BLOGGERS SPEAK OUT can be read through the highlighted link.

Comments

I fully agree! I like to see these rules implemented in tri-media! As mentioned in my recent post, I want to see the likes of Eva Longoria say ” I was paid by this company million bucks” as she flashes her ginormous fake lashes.